The city hopes to shield the mentally ill from excessive force by putting the right cop on the scene.

It’s an otherwise slow Monday night, but Officer Casey
Hettman is tense. He and two other Portland police officers move through
a dingy hallway and flank the locked apartment door.

Behind the door is an agitated man who believes President Obama is ordering him to kill.

The cops have been
summoned to the Helen M Swindells Apartments in Old Town by the man’s
county social worker, who believes he’s become a risk to himself or
others.

The
social worker tells the cop the man inside suffers from mental illness.
He wants cops to put the man on a mental-health hold and deliver him to a
hospital for observation.

Oh, and one thing, the social worker says: He likes to fight cops.

The social worker knocks. The officers brace themselves. Nothing.

Hettman is thinking, What’s this guy doing? Maybe this guy is getting something to hurt us?

“It’s not until that door opens,” Hettman says later, “and you can see their hands, see their face.”

Hettman and the other
officers are about to enter what are often the most critical moments
between police and those in a mental-health crisis: the first 30 seconds
of contact.

That’s when officers
have to spot the warning signs of someone who may have lost touch with
reality—the person’s motion, tone, level of aggression—and decide
whether the threat to their own safety outweighs the needs of the person
they’re supposed to be helping.

In the past, the
choices a few Portland police officers have made in these pivotal few
seconds prompted a U.S. Department of Justice investigation and a
finding in September that cops have a “pattern and practice” of using
excessive force against people with mental illness.

Portland
quickly reached a settlement with the DOJ and scrambled to find $5.3
million to beef up social services, create a triage center, and expand
units of officers trained to deal with the mentally ill.

Mayor-elect Charlie
Hales and Police Chief Mike Reese (whom Hales plans to keep on the job)
say they will also demand better investigation when cops do use their
fists, baton, pepper spray, Taser or gun.

Beneath this tone of
compliance runs an undercurrent of resistance and resentment. Reese,
while talking about being a reformer, had earlier signaled he disagreed
with the DOJ’s findings. And the Portland Police Association, the city’s
police union, says the DOJ settlement threatens the safety of
front-line officers.

And
it’s simply hard to buck the decades-long attitude of police, says Mike
Stafford, a former training coordinator at the state’s police academy.
Stafford says police are trained to protect themselves first and face
the consequences for their actions later.

“A common saying is, ‘It’s better to be judged by 12 than carried by six,’” he says.

Missing in this debate have been the voices of the officers themselves.

Over the past several weeks, WW
has ridden with officers on patrol, watched how they deal with people
with mental illness, and talked to them at length about what the
proposed changes will mean.

Some say a
fundamental cultural shift in the bureau’s attitudes about the use of
force is inevitable. But many others echo the union’s view that the DOJ
settlement means greater risk to officers.

“The DOJ appears to be willing to sacrifice police lives,” Officer Kevin Macho, who patrols the East Precinct, tells WW. “A Portland officer, I believe, is going to get killed because of hesitation.”

In fact, all the
plans and money that will be spent may overshadow a central truth: Some
officers are simply more adept and flexible than others in their
approach to people with mental illness. They’re the ones less willing to
default to using force. In other words, they get the problem.

The question facing
the city is whether the new DOJ-imposed strategy will keep officers who
don’t get it away from those with mental illness.

THE NEW THIN BLUE LINE: Officer Casey Hettman talks with a man who he thinks may be in a mental-health crisis. Hettman and his partner, Brad Yakots, have volunteered to be on a front-line crisis intervention team responding to mental-health calls as part of Portland’s agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. Officers say they expect the team’s performance will come under scrutiny. “I think I can handle it,” Hettman says. “I may be getting in over my head, I don’t know.”

The door of the apartment in the Swindells opens, and
Hettman and his partner, Brad Yakots, see why it took so long for the
man inside to respond: He’s using a walker.

The cops loosen their
tight shoulders a little. They tell him they are taking him for a
mental-health hold, and it requires putting him in handcuffs. “Can I
have a cigarette first?” the man asks.

Yakots says sure.
Hettman and the third officer, James Escobar, guide the cuffed man down
the hall. It’s a slow shuffle, and the man’s pants slide down his hips.
He complains, so Yakots—28, with a runner’s build and close-cropped red
hair—hikes them back up for him. They put the man in a patrol car. He
never gets his smoke.

Later that day, the officers say most incidents with people suffering from mental illness go without incident.

“This guy has a
walker and is probably not much of a threat,” says Hettman, 31, who is
tall and still lives up to his college nickname of “Skinny.”

“But what if he has a gun or a knife and wants to kill me? We’re constantly having to make split-second decisions.”

With Oregon’s broken
mental-health system, Portland’s police are often de facto front-line
social workers. Police estimate they come into contact with 1234s (their
dispatch code for person in crisis) more than 34,000 times a year,
although they lack a good way to track such calls.

The DOJ settlement calls for reinstituting a team of officers whose first duty is to deal with the mentally ill.

MEAN STREETS: Dealing with people suffering from delusions, aggression and disorientation is a daily reality for Portland cops, especially downtown, Yakots and Hettman say. The DOJ agreement is structured to summon specially trained officers to deal with people with mental illness, but that won’t always be possible. Critics say attitudes about dealing with the mentally ill must change throughout the Police Bureau.

Portland gives all
officers crisis intervention training, or CIT. But the voluntary CIT
team is supposed to put the best-trained cops between the mentally ill
and typical beat officers, and it may include Yakots and Hettman.

The two have been
partners for 2½ years—a rarity, given that most patrol officers work
alone. In that time, they’ve made 921 arrests and used force 12 times.

Their number of
arrests is high by department standards. But their use of force is
low—just over 1 percent. Overall, Portland officers used force in 3.86
percent of arrests in 2011.

“Your tongue is the
biggest tool in dealing with people in crisis,” Yakots says as the car
drives near Central Precinct. “Casey and I have different strengths, and
we deal well with people who aren’t playing with a full deck that day.”

That’s part of the reason Yakots and Hettman signed up for the latest version of a crisis intervention team.

Details of how large
the CIT squad will be, and how much more training its members will get
are still being worked out, Reese says. But the team will surely get far
more than the 40 hours of standard mental-health training every line
officer gets each year.

The Police Bureau declined to give WW
a list of officers who applied for the CIT squad, but it says 56 cops,
or about 15 percent of the department’s 365 patrol officers, signed up.

Portland had the
state’s first CIT program, from 1995 to 2006. A small band of officers
who had volunteered handled as many crisis cases as possible. The unit
had some success, but high-profile deaths still occurred when no officer
from the CIT team was on the scene or available.

That includes Jose
Mejia Poot, a day laborer who was on a mental-health hold when an
officer gunned him down inside the BHC-Pacific Gateway Hospital in
Sellwood in 2001. CIT officers had already calmed Poot earlier that day,
but hospital staff called when Poot got out of a secured area. Poot,
who could not speak English, tore off a strip of an aluminum door frame
and threatened staff. CIT cops weren’t available a second time, and the
two officers who showed up shot him dead.

CIT officers also
weren’t on hand for the death of James Chasse in 2006. Chasse was a
mentally ill man police chased and knocked down in the Pearl District,
believing he had urinated in the street. An autopsy showed he had 26
broken bones, including 16 of his ribs, some of which punctured a lung.
The city later paid Chasse’s family $1.6 million to settle a wrongful
death case.

In response,
then-Mayor Tom Potter required all officers to get 40 hours of annual
crisis intervention training—but then did away with a dedicated CIT
team.

Having officers with
advanced mental-health training will help, he says, but it will require
one important thing: that the CIT squad is big enough to respond
whenever needed.

“There are officers
who just don’t think it’s necessary,” Bouneff says. “You don’t want
those officers dealing with people in a mental-health crisis.”

In the past, many
officers didn’t see CIT as a way to get ahead in the bureau. Now, Yakots
and Hettman say, they see it as an essential skill set for a cop.

“Attitudes will change,” Hettman says, “and the more senior people and the holdouts, they won’t have a choice but to change.”

ALTERED REALITY: Yakots (left) and Hettman take a woman into custody for an outstanding warrant at the Fred Meyer on West Burnside Street. They say she has mental-health problems that alcohol and drug addiction only make worse.

Officer Herb Miller, 47, was a truck driver and National
Guardsman before joining the Portland Police Bureau 15 years ago. He’s
spent most of his time on the force dealing with the mentally ill, as
one of the original members of the CIT unit and then spending a year on
the bureau’s Mobile Crisis Unit. That assignment—limited to a year—ended
in June.

The MCU is supposed
to help people with mental illness who show up frequently on cops’
radar, before they have another confrontation with officers. The mobile
unit consists of one sworn officer and a social worker with Project
Respond, which is run by Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, a private
mental-health agency.

The DOJ settlement
calls for expanding the availability of the unit. It doesn’t involve any
extra training, but the bureau says the close on-the-ground work
provides a wealth of knowledge.

Miller found a
special draw to both the crisis intervention team and the mobile unit:
Both his nephew and niece committed suicide.

“Somehow, with my
training and experience, if I can help prevent that tragedy for someone
else’s family, that would be rewarding,” Miller says.

Yet his time on the
MCU was often frustrating. He and his partner tracked one man with
mental problems who they knew had a gun. But under the law, the MCU team
can’t force anyone into treatment, and can’t arrest anyone until they
become a danger to themselves or others.

Last October, the man
locked himself in his apartment and was pointing his gun out the window
at people in the street. The situation ended peacefully, but only after
it turned into a lengthy negotiation and an evacuation of the building.

“We had done all of
that work ahead of time,” Miller says. “We still weren’t able to
intervene and prevent the incident from happening. I saw the whole
trajectory of the way it went, and we couldn’t intervene until he
crossed the line.

“I had no more control or power than a regular officer.”

Because of his experience, Miller says he signed up for the CIT this time around out of a sense of obligation.

But the price of
keeping beat cops apart from the mentally ill may be the psychological
toll it takes on the officers who specialize in crisis intervention.

Hettman,
during his first week as an officer, watched a woman he was trying to
help jump from the Fremont Bridge to the pavement below; he heard her
hit the ground. “That was my rude awakening to the mental-health issue,”
he says.

Miller couldn’t save a
man who jumped from the Vista Bridge. “Things like that get to you,” he
says. “You have to compartmentalize it and leave it at work.”

And for these front-line teams, the psychological toll can mount.

“Going
in as a CIT officer, they’re going in with a sense of, ‘OK I’ve been
trained to help these people,’” says John Nicoletti, whose Denver-based
firm, Nicoletti-Flater Associates, specializes in police psychology.

“When that doesn’t
work, especially when it’s a traumatic ending like a suicide, you get
the combination of the trauma, and second-guessing of what you could
have done differently.”

Yakots (right) talks to a man who also appeared to be high and mentally ill creating a disturbance in front of the Living Room Theaters downtown.

Officers say that since the DOJ started its investigation
in June 2011, they’ve been increasingly reluctant to use force, even
when they think they should. The bureau says it was shifting its culture
before that: Statistics show use of force has declined 33 percent since
2008.

But some cops say the DOJ report has created a chilling—and dangerous— effect.

During one ride-along WW
took with police, three officers responded to a domestic-violence call
at an apartment near Southeast Glisan Street and 106th Avenue. A
pregnant woman was hurt, but she insisted she had fallen and that her
boyfriend—with face tattoos and a bad attitude—hadn’t pushed her.

The angry boyfriend
was bigger than the officers. In the end, they didn’t need to make an
arrest—despite their fears they might have to use force to do it.

“I thought for a minute we would have to go hands-on,” one officer, Michael Roberts, says.

Silverman, 28, has been a cop for three years (he is a former WW
intern) and says his academy training put an enormous emphasis on
officers protecting themselves—be it with less-than-lethal weapons, or
by going “hands-on,” using holds and other physical tactics to gain
control.

“When you get out of the academy,” he says, “you think there are ninjas waiting around every corner to attack you.”

If there is a
chilling effect from the DOJ stalling the use of force, some critics say
it’s good—if only because police training has instilled too much
paranoia among officers.

“There are people who
walk the streets all the time thinking someone is going to hurt them,”
says Dan Handelman, director of Portland Copwatch. “And they’re the ones
we call mentally ill.”

Eriks Gabliks,
director of the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and
Training, says the police academy’s 16-week course has increased its
role-playing scenarios on how to better communicate and diffuse
situations. And as of Jan. 1, all cops-in-training will get 15 hours of
mental and behavioral health training, up from 12.

The FBI, which tracks
officer deaths nationwide, doesn’t keep statistics on at what point in
an encounter an officer is killed. It also doesn’t track the mental
health of those who kill cops intentionally.

The FBI does say that
72 American law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in 2011.
Two were in Oregon, including one Eugene officer shot by a woman with
severe mental illness.

Officer Macho, from
the East Precinct, counters that he’s got a pinkie finger and a thumb
that no longer fully function because he was afraid to use the
appropriate level of force to end a volatile arrest. He tore the tendons
of his pinkie chasing down and arresting a juvenile vandal; he tweaked
the thumb when he says he was attempting to keep a man from punching
him. In both cases, he says that four years ago, he would have used a
Taser.

“With
what’s come down from the Department of Justice, the public’s the real
loser on this because there are many times when the officer feels like
he’s got to choose between career survival and actually jumping in when
he would have in the past.”

The DOJ report, Macho says, was a “hack job”—noting the report found fault with five cases out of thousands of arrests.

“What percentage of human beings get it as right as often as we do?” Macho asks.

Clackamas doesn’t
have a CIT team—Phillips says the county is too spread out to reliably
dispatch a team. In Marion County, all deputies have received crisis
intervention training, and those who want it can get advanced training.

What will success
look like in Portland? The DOJ settlement calls for a series of
quantitative measurements to see if the Portland police are making
improvements: for example, use of force against those with real or
perceived mental illness; the number of officers who frequently use
force; the rate of Taser use; and complaints against cops.

Hales says he’s also looking at a more subjective measure, what he calls a more “modern and humane” police force.

“Are people that you
talk to about the Police Bureau ready to call when there’s a problem on
their street?” Hales says. “Or are they wary about calling?”

Yakots and Hettman can’t help but notice the irony in one recent call.

They were the first
on the scene Nov. 26 after neighbors called police to a downtown
apartment complex, where an 81-year-old man was hallucinating that cops
were being shot and killed in his hallway. He was swinging a hatchet and
had already chopped through a fire door to reach the imaginary police
officers who had been shot.

The cops drew their
guns. “He’s trying to save police officers,” Yakots recalls, “and we
might actually wind up having to hurt the guy.”

They didn’t. They
gave him clear commands, and he let them cuff him for a mental-health
hold. He’s since been committed and could be in a mental-health facility
for as long as six months.

"In the low usage areas, we found that our vehicles sit idle four times longer, ultimately affecting overall vehicle availability for the Portland membership base, as well as parking for the Portland community."

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